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12:31 - an extraordinary photographic project involving long exposure night photography and an animation of 1,871 slices of a human cadaver. Beautiful, ethereal, technically fascinating and curiously emotional...

Ray Molony of Lux Magazine asked me to write a ‘top ten’ piece but left it up to me to decide the theme. It was interesting to start to consider what has had an impact on me over the years in terms of light experiences, and, because of my slightly strange sense of humour, I kept coming back to the idea of what my own ‘bucket list’ would be. Below, I share ten places, things or events that have been powerful personal experiences or which remain yet-to-be-achieved desires.

Some may appear obvious but hopefully not all. So, in no particular order …


No.1: The Pantheon, Rome
No.2: Cirque du Soleil, Las Vegas
No.3: La Sainte Chapelle, Paris
No.4: The Lightning Field, New Mexico, USA
No.5: The Aurora Borealis
No.6: The Roden Crater, Arizona
No.7: The Chinati Foundation, Texas
No.8: The Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp
No.9: The Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
No.10: The Milky Way
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Wonderful blog consisting entirely of pictures of scaffolding. Or "Skeletal Archiporn" as the curator calls it.

Scaffoldage.com

So much more interesting than it sounds. Trust me.

One of my key inspirations is the great first century Byzantine church, Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul. The following is an extract from The Silientary's Poem, by Paulus, son of Cyrus, written in 563 AD. It covers all aspects of the Hagia Sophia and must surely be one of the first ever written statements on light.
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Artists Davy and Kristin McGuire made this experimental pop-up book called the ‘The Ice Book’. It tells the story of a princess who lures a boy into the forest in order to warm her heart of ice. The Ice book really is a miniature theatre show merging film, theatre, dance, mime and animation into pop-up book. Video projection is used to bring the cutted plain white paper to life. More information can be found here and here.

Just came across the wonderful work of Japanese motion designer Abe Shingo. Abe Shingo is director at Tokyo based motion graphic studio W0W. What is really interesting in the work of W0W is the use of light. Very often W0W and Shingo like to use ‘dirty’ urban city light, which makes it interesting from a lighting design point of view. The animations transform the ordinary urban lighting to a dynamic poetic idea. This gives very interesting contrast by the ‘real’ light and ‘imaginary’ in the films of W0W and Shingo. The You tube channel and websites of W0W and Abe Shingo are definitely worth a look as well.

Mark Visser surfs 30ft waves off Maui, Hawaii in the early hours of January 20th 2011- as you do.

A recent visit to Chicago reminded me of the impact that reflective facades have on the way we see our surroundings. Their appearance constantly changes according to the angle of view or the weather – creating a visual dynamic, which at times can be delightful and sometimes confusing.

In some ways they are the daylight pre-cursors to the current rash of media facades that are spreading around the world creating different after-dark experiences of our urban environments. And yes – Anish Kapoor’s jelly bean is stunning by day and by night!
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We've just replaced, refurbished and generally improved the lighting in our Edinburgh studio. Some of the equipment was 15 years old, and certainly not using the most cutting-edge technologies!

By refurbing some 150w metal halide floods and changing them to 70w, replacing some tungsten halogen pendants with LED modules, swapping some power-hungry theatre kit for CDM-R spots, and retrofitting our GLS task lights with LED, we've reduced our connected lighting load by about 62%. By adding a daylight sensor and much better logic to the control system, we'll be diversifying the load even further... oh, and we've finally integrated the lighting control and the AV kit at the conference table.

Not just this, but we have a brighter, more appropriately lit studio too!

(PS - for language pedants, "practice" and "practise" seem equally relevant!)
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Are you one of those who find pedestrian crosswalks a bit of a nerve rack? I won’t blame you. Even if you’re confident you’re looking the correct side first (which is a challenge on its own in London), how can you ever be sure the driver hasn’t missed you walking in the middle of the streets?! Those washed away white lines on the asphalt are not that trustworthy, Are they?

Well, Art.Lebedev Studio claims to have solved the problem in Russia with a new lighting concept to increase safety of pedestrians when crossing the road. The idea is to double mark the “Zebra” lines with illuminated stripes put above the road.

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